Vietnamese Cuisine

Vietnamese cuisine builds meals around rice, fresh herbs added at the table rather than cooked in, and a cultivated balance of salty, sour, sweet, bitter and spicy flavors. A millennium of Chinese rule left its mark in the north through techniques such as stir frying and ingredients such as soy sauce, while nearly a century of French colonization added the baguette, pate and coffee culture, most visibly in banh mi and ca phe sua da. Meals are typically shared family style, and cooking varies meaningfully between the north, center and south of the country. This balance of flavors follows a traditional framework of five fundamental tastes, spicy, sour, bitter, salty and sweet, each linked to one of five organs, a philosophy cooks still draw on when composing a dish.